The Sentinel with Robert Altman for The Company 1/25/04

Altman the modest
By Jay Boyar | Sentinel Movie Critic 1/25/04

    Robert Altman sometimes takes humility to extremes. The director of M*A*S*H, Nashville, Gosford Park, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Player, The Long Goodbye and Vincent & Theo, among other masterpieces, has plenty to boast about. But he doesn't.
    Take, for example, the case of Altman's new dance-world film, which opens Friday and stars Neve Campbell and the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Asked about The Company, Altman immediately credits Campbell.
    "Oh, this is really her movie," he says, a modest Midwestern twang coming through on the phone. "She started it. She's the one that wanted to do it. She put her own money up for development at various stages of it."
    A statement like that might be construed as mere graciousness, an appreciative filmmaker's attempt to praise his star and benefactor. But Altman doesn't stop there.
    "I would say, without qualification, if you take any film of mine and take the six best things - really high points of it that hit the top of the graph - every one of those six points came from somebody else," he says.
    What this omits, of course, is that the director is the one who, in most cases, selects the cast and crew and, in a thousand other ways, shapes the vision that somehow always turns out to be, indisputably Altmanesque.
    The Company's Alberto Antonelli - played by Malcolm McDowell and ostensibly based on the Joffrey's co-founder and artistic director, Gerald Arpino - seems like an especially obvious Altman alter ego. This complex character is vain and humble, callous and sympathetic, intense and easygoing, autocratic and generous, calculating and sincere.
    Does Altman see himself in Antonelli?
    "A little bit," he admits, sounding, for the first time, just a tad shy. "I mean," he adds with a laugh, "we all do that same kind of hustle."